So, I’m bringing a little Chromebox back into use on our home network to do some basic network services: dhcp, dns, and probably actually using it as a router (long story; tl;dr TekSavvy says they’ll give you a /56 but then the VDSL modem they sell you can’t do DHCPv6-PD properly). Anyway… I slapped Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial server on it and started plugging away at a couple of things. I opted to use ISC’s newer Kea DHCP server rather than isc-dhcp-server. Little did I know that Ubuntu and systemd had other ideas… ... Read more

As part of some mail filter testing, I needed to install ESET Mail Security onto a Debian 4.0 Etch VPS running on Virtuozzo. As a side-note, I found that the install package for ESET’s Gateway Filter, Mail Security, and File Server Security for Linux is all the exact same package; the functionality is basically just controlled/activated by means of licensing the appropriate component. Anyway, the download comes as an installation script called esets. ... Read more

I had not previously played aroung much with MySQL replication, but got the chance to do so recently. I’m doing some testing with a new mail filter setup composed of amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, and some other SA modules running through Postfix on Debian Etch. The setup uses Maia Mailguard as a web front-end and management system, including per-user settings and quarantines. We’re using MySQL for the database backend for Maia for storing quarantines, per-user settings and the like, but wanted to have a dual-MX setup with a secondary MX sitting in a remote site. ... Read more

I haven’t played around much in Linux lately, but I finally dusted off my Ubuntu CD’s and started tooling around again. I already had Vista installation on my work laptop, and did not want to blow that away, so I erred on the side of caution by not letting the Xubuntu setup program install its own GRUB bootloader…except then I couldn’t get into the Linux OS… So, off I go in search of GRUB install guides, and just about every how-to out there is using the basic scenario that GRUB was installed in the first place, and that it just needs to reinstall itself, which was totally not the case this time around! ... Read more